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Korean vs Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 1 of 11 12 December 2010 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Nobody asked this yet.
Being the biggest problem for linguists, Japanese and Korean are the languages with biggest number of speakers, that scientists cannot classify. There are theories about Altaic family, Even Austronesian family, Isolated language theory, common Japanese-Korean family theory, and finally Japonic language family theory (Wikipedia). What is your opinion? and why? me, as I study both of them. I would like to portray some similarities: asa 아사 あさ= it means morning in Japanese, and this word was used in some old Korean as well (modern Korean uses different word). Topic particle: both languages have it - but it does not exist in Turkish, exists in Mongolian (but is maybe slightly less used - my Mongolian is very poor, so I cannot say). onomatopoeia - both languages have plenty of it and use it extensively (whereas on the west using too much of it, is considered a little childish ) politeness levels - used in both languages r/l - both don't discriminate between those sounds da - both use this word in similar meaning similar sound system - you cannot end word in Japanese with any vowel except for n in Korean you have more to choose from, but it's still not many. there are also differences- adjectives - they almost don't exist in Korean, whereas they exist in Japanese (they conjugate though, and sometimes verbs can turn into adjectives - taberu - - tabenai (not eat - an adjective it conjugates as an adjective). most words aren't similar Unfortunately I cannot say anything about Tungusic language family, since I don't know any of those languages. Is there anybody who can speak it? Edited by clumsy on 12 December 2010 at 12:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pantherus Newbie Australia Joined 5103 days ago 13 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 2 of 11 15 December 2010 at 9:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm currently studying both Korean and Japanese. I assumed (probably wrongly) that at one time in history, Japanese and Korean were like dialects of Chinese that broke off and changed sentence syntaxes and grammar over time. Hence, the similar Chinese-origin words.
I notice that it's quite easy to distinguish between Japanese sounds and such, but Korean is quite hard for beginners. Characters such as - ㅈ and ㅊ - ㅂ and ㅃ and ㅍ - ㄱ and ㅋ - ㄷ and ㅌ - ㅐ and ㅔ as well as ㅒ and ㅖ - ㅅ and ㅆ - ㅓ and ㅗ People new to Korean also sometimes hear ㄴ as ㄷ because of the way it's pronounced sometimes. As well as ㅁ which can sometimes sound like ㅂ. I focused on a lot of listening exercises, and in no time I could distinguish relatively well, but when I learned Japanese (at a young age), I never had this problem due to little sound similarities between letters. So, I guess there's more of a variety of similar sounds in Korean. But yes, they share A LOT of similarities which is quite helpful. When I started Korean, I hadn't even researched it. I just thought it sounded cool and wanted to learn it, so I did. And then my language tutor, who speaks both, told me all these similarities and I was shocked. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 3 of 11 15 December 2010 at 10:04am | IP Logged | |||||
The similar Chinese origin words are just the result of them both borrowing words from Chinese. It absolutely does not indicate that Japanese and Korean were once Chinese dialects, and in fact there isn't really any evidence that this case. See: Sino-Japanese Vocabulary Sino-Korean Vocabulary 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pantherus Newbie Australia Joined 5103 days ago 13 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 4 of 11 15 December 2010 at 10:46am | IP Logged | |||||
No, it doesn't indicate that both are Chinese dialects. I just assumed that many, many centuries ago, Japanese and Korean were some sort of Chinese variation/dialect. I didn't state that they were definitely dialects at all. However, it seems more like they became pseudo-dialects. They adopted the writing system and many words, then slowly drifted apart, creating difference. Not dialects in the way that Taiwanese and Mandarin and Shanghainese are, but something different. So, don't worry. I'm not a language professor and I'm not trying to spread around fallacies. I'm just speculating and discussing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 11 15 December 2010 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
You are most certainly wrong about the Chinese dialect origin. Japanese and Korean are a lot closer (syntactically, grammatically, morphologically, etc.) to many of the indigenous languages spoken north of China such as Mongolian, etc. Chinese languages are monosyllabic and tonal; not the same thing at all. Chinese languages, and Japanese and Korean are about as far from eachother linguistically as you can possibly get, apart from the fairly recent influence that lead to some lexical borrowing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 11 15 December 2010 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
Speculation and discussion is great, I didn't mean to sound like I was accusing you of spreading fallacies. We're just saying your assumption is wrong— this is the discussion part of "speculating and discussing". :) The problem with viewing Japanese and Korean as some sort of Chinese variation/dialects, is that we normally wouldn't consider other languages with similar interactions as such. Consider that we don't consider English a Latin variation/dialect just because we adopted the writing system and an enormous part of our vocabulary from it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5345 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 11 22 December 2010 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've also noticed that Japanese and Korean are very similar when it comes to grammar. I'm convinced that there is something deeper behind it. The similarity can't be a coincidence. After all, you can always find a certain dominant logic or feature that is common to all if not most of the languages belonging to a certain language family, e.g. many Indo-European languages tend to be gendered and have a developed case system, Semitic languages tend to have a root consonant system, Turkic languages are highly agglunative, Sinitic languages are tonal and their vocabulary is composed of meaningful syllables at the base level, etc.
In the same way, Japanese and Korean use particles to indicate grammatical case, have multiple speech levels and rely on a participial structure instead of relative pronouns to express relative clauses. Grammatical similarity alone isn't enough for modern linguistics, however. The vocabulary of a given language has to have a high degree of similarity with another language before relatedness can be established. This is where it gets frustrating for Japanese and Korean: their native vocabularies are very dissimilar.
If you think about it, adjectives can be very verb-like in Japanese as well. While adjectives have distinct forms from verbs, adjectives can be verb-like (verbish?) in that they can complete a sentence on their own, not needing a copula. For example: ○ Natsu wa igai to samui. (The summer is unexpectedly cold.) and not × Natsu wa igai to samui da. In fact, in a syntactic sense Japanese doesn't even have any words that function as adjectives (of course, Japanese adjectives are adjectives in a semantic sense). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jsun Groupie Joined 5086 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes | Message 8 of 11 23 December 2010 at 11:05am | IP Logged | |||||
Korean character looks Tibetan, which is made from Indic script. Tibetan made script for Mongolian at some point. Indic-script from Nepal->Tibetan -> Mongolian->Korean Therefore, they looks a bit English alphabet. 
Tibetan script is ultimately from one of the Sanskrit script. But this indic script looks English to me. The Tibetan g (I mean g sound) looks like English g. Tibetan k looks really like English k. (turn 270 degrees counter clockwise) Therefore, Korean script looks a bit like English script. I guess that Sanskrit script was pick up by Greek? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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